On 09/20/2007 09:29 PM, Russell L. Harris wrote:
* Douglas A. Tutty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [070920 21:10]:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 04:28:09PM -0400, Gregory O'Neal wrote:
I am new to linux. I have been running Etch for a month or so now on
my Gateway Desktop. I am considering moving up to testing. This brings
up the question of what is the proper way to accomplish the upgrade?
May I humbly suggest that you may not have had time to learn enough
about linux or Debian to run testing? It is, after all, _testing_.
Humbug! Your comment may be applicable to "unstable", but not to
"testing". I ran "unstable" for about two years, and I experienced
very few difficulties.
But Gregory is a month-long veteran on Debian--not a two-year veteran.
Douglas' comment to Gregory was apt.
"Stable" perhaps is appropriate in a commercial environment in which
it is prudent to sacrifice enhancements in order to gain absolute
reliability.
I have been running Debian "testing" for three or four years, and I
personally have found it more stable and bug-free than the production
versions of RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE. And there simply is no
comparison between the reliability of "testing" and M$ Window$ (which
novices all over the world are running).
Non sequitor. We're not comparing Debian with Windows in this thread.
We're comparing Debian with Debian (i.e. Debian/Testing to
Debian/Stable). "Testing" consists of software that is still being
tested; the distribution is going to have a lot of bugs, and it's going
to be a lot more problematic for new Debian users than "stable."
As a very experienced Debian user, you are able to handle, within hours,
problems that would force a newbie to reinstall.
On rare occasion, update of a package may leave something broken, but
I never have found such problems to be terribly serious, and they
typically are corrected with a few weeks at most -- most often, within
a few days -- simply by allowing Synaptic to update packages whenever
package updates are available.
RLH
Great, and thank you. :-)
Your work is helping to create the next great version of the Debian O/S.
That's because you're willing to use "testing" and report on its bugs.
"Testing" is not a released version of Debian; "testing" exists to get
bugs fixed. You only use testing if you want to test software.
Douglas was just suggesting that Gregory use a released, stable version
of Debian because a one-month Debian user probably doesn't have the
experience to help test Linux software.
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